But it happened anyway.
In St. Louis, they stored you in this warehouse full of cots and potato chips and thin blankets that barely kept you warm in the dank space. One night you woke up unable to breathe because someone had a hand clamped over your mouth. You fought, but there were too many strong arms in the dark, and no matter how much you bucked and thrashed and cried out, those arms were too powerful. The siren was going off in your head—Not happening Not happening Not happening—but it was. The sweat of your attackers dripping on you. The horrifying pain as one after another jammed himself up your ass until you lost track of how many wanted in, until your mind went blank, and you went somewhere else. Floating through cold space without an astronaut suit. The next day you got a letter in the mail from Raquel, and she’d included a picture Toby drew of his hand, transformed into a Thanksgiving turkey with hearing aids. The picture just said Hi Daddy! It was enough to make you want to fucking kill yourself. In the flooding outside St. Louis, a minor mudslide had buried a house, including the elderly woman who lived inside. Dirt in her throat, mouth, and eyes, it looked like she had been screaming when you unearthed her face. That’s how you felt. So you started taking every one of the most dangerous assignments. You waded into raging floodwaters with only a carabiner to keep you from getting torn downstream. You walked up buckling apartment stairs. You crawled into hot, wet holes on the off chance you might find a survivor, not because you wanted to be a hero but because you wanted one of these structures to fall on you. That’s how you ended up finding the little girl in her crib. The men did it again in Nashville, and this time you didn’t fight, but it stopped after that. It was almost like you unnerved them after you started running headfirst into rubble all the time, throwing your body into the hands of uncaring fate. That, or they found someone new to rape in the dark.
You did your time on the front lines of these nightmares. You got your reduced sentence. You went home to Raquel, who you can’t touch or let yourself be touched by. Electric anxiety coursing through you all the time, every moment of the day, a fear of crowds, a fear of sleep, but especially a fear when she reaches for you, and you think of who you really are.
That night, you eat two boxes of mac ’n’ cheese between the three of you. Each box cost over $6, and when Toby spills his plate on the floor, you and Raquel both snap at him, and he bursts into tears. It feels like your entire lives are in that greasy yellow smear you must mop up with a towel. You scoop some of your portion onto Toby’s plate and Raquel does the same. You demand he eat it, but now he’s afraid. “So go to bed hungry, Toby,” Raquel snarls, and lifts him harshly from his chair. She carries him to his room and leaves him there.
Later, in bed next to a snoring Raquel, you want a drink so bad you consider putting on your shoes and walking to a liquor store. Or if you could get a pill. Or just an irreparable dose of fent. You’re awake when Toby starts crying. Raquel stirs, pops up, her silk headwrap coming undone. You tell her you’ll take care of it. She doesn’t say anything, just sleepily fixes her headwrap and collapses back to her pillow.
You stumble through the dark trailer in the direction of Toby’s wails, but he’s already standing in his door looking at you with tears in his eyes, banging the heels of his hands against his head. He’s crying too hard for you to understand what he’s saying.
“Gooooosh,” he sort of says. And you realize he’s having trouble breathing. He’s holding his stomach. His chest hitches and his lips tremble and he has that panic in his eyes. What it must feel like to not be able to draw your next breath.
“Where’s your inhaler?”
He shakes his head and holds it up. You know it’s empty. You and Raquel haven’t refilled the prescription because he’d been doing so well. And because you’ve needed every last cent to eat. You pick him up and take him to the kitchen, where you sit him on the counter.
“Sit up straight, bud. Let the air come in.” He does as he’s told, but it’s not helping. You try to think of the sign for it. You don’t know breathe, but you do know calm, and so you press your palms down twice and say the word. Then you hug his small body. His arms come around you. “Breathe with me. Slow and deep, okay? You feel me breathing? Slow and deep.”
For a while, it doesn’t work. He’s gyrating and fearful in your embrace, coughing, slapping your shoulders to tell you this is not working. But you keep soothing him. You’ve seen Raquel do it this way. His asthma is bad, but his panic is what makes it worse. You also know that while you were away, Raquel had to take him to the hospital once, and that bill is still not paid off.
You stand there holding him, and at some point, you feel him draw one, full, good breath.
“Good, buddy, that’s good. Just like that.”
He takes another breath, then another. His small hands stop flapping against you. His head comes to rest on your shoulder. The smell of his sweat is so distinctly the scent of a little boy: shampooey and clean with just a tinge of the dirt he scratched into his scalp that night. After a while, he’s breathing almost regularly. His tears have stopped. He looks at you.
“Better?”
He nods, brown button eyes swollen with gratitude and fear.
“What happened?”
You don’t understand the sign: He pinches together the thumb and index fingers of both hands. They kiss, and then the right hand spirals upward. “Gooosh,” he mumbles. “Oww dare.” He points out the window.
Out there, was what he was saying. Then the rest of it clicks. He was signing “ghost.”
You draw him a glass of water, and then take him back to his room. You tape a garbage bag over his window so the ghost can’t look in, but he doesn’t want you to go. You hate that it feels wrong for you to sleep beside him, but it does. So you won’t. You sit on his bed hugging him instead, until he falls asleep in your arms.
The next day, Raquel’s at work, Toby at school, so you take the long walk to see Reverend Andrade. There are no sidewalks on the road out, so the slush works into the holes in your boots. Your feet are soaked and numb by the time you get there. The church is open but no one is around. Back beyond the pews, past Jesus’s winsome stare, you find the reverend in his office pushing paper.
“I wanna get high,” you say. “I want to get fucked up so bad, I think I’m going crazy.”
The reverend nods as if this is no biggie and points behind you to the couch. “Take a seat, Keeper.”
You do, and he heads for his plush leather chair. He often repeats the story of how he found it on the side of the road when he was a broke Bible college student, and it was the only piece of furniture he’d kept all these years. “Fits my butt just right,” he says now as he lowers himself into it. “Tell me what’s going on.”
It annoys you. How this is no crisis to him, and you let the acid flare in your voice.
“I don’t know, Rev. Maybe ’cause I got like six bucks in the whole world and my woman thinks I’m a fuckup and my kid’s a fucking retard and I can’t find any way out of this.”
When your eyes dart to him, he looks displeased with you. “You don’t have to blame Toby. None of this is your son’s fault.”